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No one wants the dreaded Asian carp to get into the Great Lakes. But taxpayers on both sides of the border could be hooked for billions to keep the ecosystem-Destroying fish out. Debora Van Brenk reports on just-released options to slam the door shut on the fish

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A monster fish that could destroy the Great Lakes can be contained, but it’ll cost billions of dollars to build barriers and other safeguards to keep it out, a just-released report says.

The menace is the Asian carp, a foreign invader the U.S. government calls “the most acute threat facing the Great Lakes today.”

It could cost up to $18.3 billion to slam shut the lakes’ entryways against the rapidly advancing scourge, now just a few km from Lake Michigan, says the first detailed study of options and costs.

The cheapest of eight options would cost $68 million, the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in the study released Monday.

The most effective choices, it says, include separating Lake Michigan from its troublesome tributaries and the cost for those ranges from a low of $8 billion to more than double that.

The rapidly-producing carp can grow as large as a big kid and multiply by the tens of thousands. Voracious, they eat plankton that fuels aquatic life, making them a menace to fishing and tourism.

Officials on both sides of the Canada-U.S. border say the invasion threat is too high, too imminent, to waste time on half measures.

All it would take for the carp to populate the lakes is 10 mature ones getting in, one Canadian researcher has estimated.

“It’s not in our own best interests to cheap out,” said Geoff Peach, head of the Goderich-based Lake Huron Centre For Coastal Conservation. He believes the best approach is to set up a permanent barrier against invasive species swimming into the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River.

Right now, an in-water electric barrier is among the main defenders against carp invasion, a measure many analysts agree is only marginally reliable.

“There’s a $7-billion fishing industry that could be wiped out,” Peach said. “There needs to be a permanent solution to the issue because we know that Asian carp are a threat to the Great Lakes.”

Whatever the solution, there’s an urgent need to make a decision and allocate the cash, said Daivd Ullrich, executive director of the Great Lakes and St. Lawrence Cities Initiative, a coalition of Canadian and American mayors and lake advocates.

“Regardless of what solution is suggested, stepped-up interim measures need to be implemented quickly,” Ullrich said.

That’s because most of the options involve a 10- to 25-year time frame, but the carp are already on the lakes’ doorstep.

Ullrich’s group issued a report two years ago that suggested complete separation take place between waterways and Lake Michigan, a measure his group estimated at $4 billion.

Six of the eight options in this report propose a variation on that option.

The Army Corps didn’t choose a preferred option from the eight it outlined.

The biggest opposition to closing off canals linking rivers and Lake Michigan has come from the industry involved in barge shipments to Chicago.

But Ullrich said barge traffic to the Midwest city is a small and shrinking mode of transportation.

The Army Corps has scheduled consultation sessions in several U.S. Midwest cities, starting Thursday.

Ullrich’s group is asking one of the meetings be held in Canada because the Asian carp is a Canadian issue, too, and because it’ll take more than one source of funding to protect the lakes.